The present invention relates to text spacing adjustment for desktop publishing. During desktop publishing of an electronic text, characters of the text are composed into lines, and in each line, spacings are set between adjacent characters. In general, each character has a default spacing value. Default spacing values, however, are only provisional, and spacings can be adjusted during line composition. A different spacing can be set according to the attributes of the text or intentions of a user. For example, the required spacing can depend on one or more of the following: the position of a character in a line or in a word, the preceding and following characters, line justification, language environment, and aesthetic considerations. In texts with Roman characters, a spacing adjustment technique typically uniformly rescales spacings in a line of characters, for example, based on the total number of characters or words in the line. Alternatively, local spacings can be manually changed by a user. In texts with Japanese characters, however, spacings typically follow the guidelines of a government-issued JIS document 4051 for Japanese line composition. According to these guidelines, spacings are based on pre-defined classifications of Japanese characters. When adhering to this classification, each spacing is adjusted individually, because the adjustment depends on the character classes corresponding to the characters preceding and following the spacing.